And don't forget that storage is getting cheaper so it will get more and more practical to save a some of that midday solar energy to be used in the evening.
more interesting is, if that is actually true. Or only true because idk. the investors also bought the land and they profits are used to amortize the land buying cost etc.
I actually live in Denmark, and we can produce solar energy just fine. My dad installed rooftop solar 10 years ago, and that thing has 90% of his electricity usage since then. It's still producing at around 85% capacity too.
How is that supposed to work with cloudy days with barely 7 hours of daylight in winter?
Americans tend to forget how far north Europe is compared to the US.
It’s basically like walking through a industrial estate, just with more grass in between. Really very bleak.
Give me an onshore wind farm over this.
Please don't do this. It is not an "existential threat" outside of various fundraising pamphlets and political organizations, and they exploit science for political gain at the cost of the credibility of the whole enterprise.
No, it’s not, and no, we don’t know that. Humans will survive climate change. Rich countries will survive, too.
Personally I like the panels
Europe as a whole has engaged in greenwashing where instead of really solving their emissions and energy problems has simply offshored those problems to poorer countries. If a neighbour uses fossil fuels for electricity generation and you buy their excess electrricity, you're not greener. You've just cooked the books.
People who might say "when I go outside at this very specific place solar panels look ugly" should carry no weight when those solar panels (in Denmark's case) covers 0.2% of rural land. Go somewhere else.
Unsurprisingly, China is leading here by making solar panel installations have multiple uses like reversing desertification and use vegetation growth from the shade and the water used to clean the panels as a place for grazing livestock. Obviously Europe in general and Denmark in particular doesn't have deserts, of course.
I'm generally a fan of putting solar panels on non-arable land. In the US, that's much of the southwest, which incidentally also has very good solar yields because of the high amount of sunshine. There are whole areas of grass plains that can't be used for traditional farming as we discovered in the 1930s. It was called the Dust Bowl. There was a famous book written about it (ie the Grapes of Wrath).
What I don't understand is why we don't build more solar around or over highways. This is already public land and it's land not doing anything else. The solar wouldn't interfere with the core purpose either. I guess people want solar panels tucked away where few can see them.
They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.
The Desertec project could have turned a relatively small patch of Libyan desert into a solar farm that could supply all of Europe's electricity except that politics makes it impossible.
That’s kind of what we do today for pretty much everything. Most of the population on the planet doesn’t live near oil rigs, refineries, solar farms, power plants or wind. In fact most of the population doesn’t live near where we produce our food or most of the things we need for survival.
EU has enough areas with sparse population and not that much nature which also are south enough to have it work out well with solar panels of the current generations.
And besides that even most EU countries have enough places in them to still put a lot of solar panels without much issues and/or replacing fields.
going as far as North Africa is a bit too far to be convenient for power transport
the issue is less the transport distances but changes in "from where to where" sometimes needing some extensions/improvements to the power grid. Through commonly in ways which anyway make sense and all pretty much "standard" solutions well understood. Through there are some more complicated exceptions to that.
EDIT: "distances we speak about" assumed less many local less dense populate/suitable spots across the EU, not a mega project like a energy pipeline from North Afrika.
- that village is the exception, not the norm at all
- that village is in a "small" (on agricultural scale) strip of solar panels, around which there are green fields over green fields over green field ....
- the photos are deceptive, the first is from the start of the strip to the end and contains the huge majority of all solar panels in like a 50km? 100km? radius. The second photo does not show the village but a separate house up the street, if the photo where in a bit more flat angle you would see a normal filed behind the solar panels. The village itself has a "strip" of (small) green fields around it which should make it less bad to live there.
I mean don't get me wrong it probably sucks for the home owners in Hjolderup. But it's not representative for the situation in Denmark at all.
the images in the article looks bad
until you take a short look at satellite images and realize:
- it's not the norm but the exception
- the photos are made to make it look maximally bad in a deceptive/manipulative way,
and that is even in context, that Denmark is a special case in that it both quite small and has little "dead" (not agriculturally efficiently usable land). And many old "culturally" protected houses where fitting solar on top of it is far more complicated/inefficient. Don't get me wrong it isn't the only special case, but there are very many countries which don't really have such issues.
Also quite interestingly this "iron fields" can be "not bad" from a nature perspective, at least compared to mono-culture with pesticide usage. Due to the plant and animal live below them. Through that is assuming people do extra steps to prevent that live.
It's similar to the telephoto shots of wind farms taken from far away that make them seem really close together.
Its the Guardian so that is a very unlikely motivation.
P.s I am pro renewable and pro-solar/wind/nuclear just to clarify that this is nothing about my personal beliefs.
It is convenient to be suspicious against news that isn’t aligned with your views.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2020/jan/29/...
I bet makes the person dealing with the outcome of being surrounded by them feel a lot better.
It also presents the draw man that solar can only go in huge fields that would otherwise grow food.
There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.
Ie https://www.eventplanner.net/news/10582_largest-solar-carpor...
> There are plenty of rooftops and car parks that can be covered in solar to excellent benefit.
It's worth calling this approach out too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
honestly that always sounded very misguided to me
fields are not perfectly renewable, biomas gets removed from them and fertilizers can only help so much in any given time frame
mostly corn/raps mono-culture can make that easily far worse
and not needing to import food can safe a lot of energy too
also as you mentioned, modern solar panels seem overall more efficient
in difference to solar or wind, biodiesel just seem a very bad choice
Though the recent election is slight swing to the left, and the newly created right wing parties are already undergoing various forms of internal meltdowns, making a center left government friendly green energy projects most likely.
but it doesn't look like there actually is a major issues. A look at satellite images it looks more like a problem for a handful of people across all of Denmark which then is misrepresented by populist, to push anti-solar propaganda.
(Oh, and we don't even know how much the people in Hjolderup do resent it. Like seriously, they might even have put the solar panels there them-self to make money, idk.. Because conveniently the article shows pictures of Hjolderup to invoke a felling of how terrible it is, but never any interviews or options with anyone _from_ Hjolderup. )
The design goal of adding a battery to grid power sources is to capture energy that would otherwise be lost when demand is lower than generation. In addition to capturing excess production of wind or solar-derived energy, one could capture unused energy from our current baseload generating plants overnight. We could also, this would also let us capture the energy that would otherwise be wasted by unnecessary nighttime lighting.
On the outskirts of town we have a 40MW solar farm about the same size as the golf course. Most people have no idea it's there, it uses barely any land compared to the rest of farmland around here. That generates about 40GWh a year.
The cost of renting the land it's on each year is about £20k a year, or 50p per MWh, basically nothing. Land is effectively free compared to the value from "farming the sun", it's far cheaper than the scaffolding to put 8kWp on a roof